This invention relates generally to quality control machinery for use in a manufacturing operation and, more particularly, to apparatus and method for stripping sheet material such as paper or film from a bobbin and measuring characteristics of the material.
Many manufacturing operations use large rolls of paper material or the like. Often the quality of the material needs to be checked before the material is used in manufacturing a product. For example, large bobbins of tipping paper are used in the production of cigarettes to attach a filter to the tobacco rod. Frequently, tipping paper contains small perforations to adjust the level of dilution of the cigarette. After the tipping paper has been perforated, e.g., by a laser perforating machine, and prior to production of the cigarettes, the spacing and size of the holes must be checked.
It is desirable to have as much of the quality checking process be automated as possible. By automating the process, speed and accuracy are increased. Additionally, the cost of manufacturing is reduced.
Some manufacturing operations use employees to manually delaminate the bobbin and manually measure the material to check its quality. Such an operation is highly labor intensive. As a result it is time consuming, inefficient and costly.
Other manufacturing operations utilize machinery to perform the quality control checks. However, even these operations require employees to manually feed the material to the measurement machinery, and/or control the operation.
It will be appreciated from the foregoing that a totally automatic bobbin stripping and measuring apparatus is a needed improvement. The present invention fulfills this need.